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Imperial Bureau of Galactic Vigilance
The Imperial Bureau of Galactic Vigilance (IBGV) is the Imperator's cloak and dagger to the sword and shield of the Bragulan Warmachine. For, as he himself once said, "the cost of Bragulanity is eternal vigilance", thus it is through the IBGV that the Imperator watches over the entirety of his dominion and the outlying nine vectors of space yet to be under his glourious rule. The claws of the Bureau are far reaching and far more insidious than most would imagine, confined not just inside Bragulan territory or encroaching merely within the Koprulu Zone, but also without, as the true extent of the Imperator's inscrutible machinations range far and wide - for as many as Bragulanity's enemies are, the methods by which the IBGV can strike them down and wreak their expedient demise far exceeds their numerosity. Organization The IBGV is a massive agency responsible for not only watching over a hostile galaxy and undermining the horrendously huge human hegemonies populating it, but also the surveillance of the Bragulan Star Empire's own internal power structures - monitoring various civilian government organizations and ensuring that they are kept in line; providing assistance and intelligence to the militaries and justice-enforcement while simultaneously scrutinizing them thoroughly for signs of dissent, be it real or perceived; and maintaining the ideological purity of the general citizenry, examining the correctness their thought contents, and rebuking any observed or suspected intellectual deviations. The scope of the IBGV permeates the entirety of Bragulan society, from its upper echelons to its lowest segments, for it is in line with Byzonist theory where it is said that the Imperator's unblinking gaze truly sees all. Outside the Empire, the external activities of the IBGV are similar to that of many other foreign intelligence services, but in a much more extensive scale owing to the unique situation faced by the Bragulan Star Empire in the Koprulu Zone, where it is locked in perpetual low-intensity combat with its principal enemy, the Sovereignty, as well as skirmishes with the Byzantine Imperium. IBGV agents operate in foreign nations as well as in Wild Space, inside and outside of the K-Zone, where they deal with not only the agents of CEID and the Inquisition, but also the operatives of other major and minor polities. It is in the crucible of this invisible war that the IBGV has honed its skills in esionage and wetwork to not-inconsiderable efficacy. The general lack of technological sophistication on the Bragulan Star Empire's part has forced the IBGV to compensate by adopting various cruder, though no less effective, methodologies that has garnered it a not-entirely-undeserved reputation of brutality and ruthlessness in galactic intelligence circles. This has not hampered the Bureau in carrying out the traditional roles expected of any self-respecting intelligence service, such as: performing assassinations, funding minor regimes and sponsoring revolutionaries in third worlds, intelligence gathering through both covert and overt means, conducting acts of state-sponsored terrorism, delivering political messages through assassinations, delivering political messages through acts of state-sponsored terrorism, extraterritorial rendition, and supporting anti-human movements throughout known space, to name a few. The aforementioned roles of the IBGV has led it to be divided to two almost equally large divisions, each with a myriad of smaller sub-divisions inside it, and though there is a considerable overlap between the two, they are generally segregated by their function and field of operations - domestically, inside the Bragulan Star Empire; and externally, outside the Empire. External Vigilance It is the branch of the IBGV that the outside galaxy has had most contact with, and the face of the IBGV that the galaxy's intelligence services are most familiar with. External Vigilance is charged with operating in foreign territories, gathering information on the Empire's enemies and its friends (a common joke among IBGV-EV agents is that the Empire has no friends) through a variety of means, building up useful long-term intelligence networks in other nations for various purposes, the conduction of both covert and overt activities directed at foreign personnel, entities and/or assets as well as retribution operations against indigenous Bragulan personnel, entities and/or assets who have become foreign. External Vigilance is simultaneously a tool of espionage and subterfuge, communication and miscommunication, information and disinformation, and retribution. To carry out its task, over a prolonged period of time External Vigilance has built up a massive network of cells, associates and channels. Among those included in this web of deceit are amoral independent businessmen and tradesmen of various degrees of prominence, private shipping companies or fronts with commercial vessels being used as IBGV spyships; smugger rings, arms-dealers and gun-runners who've helped proliferate Bragtech weaponry in third worlds, making Bragulan arms prevalent in Wild Space hotspots and turning the deadly K-bolter into a symbol of galactic revolutionaries; the revolutionaries themselves, either alien movements struggling against humanity's rampant expansionism, or even human ones that willingly ally with the Bragulans to fight a common enemy, who when victorious become Bragulan-backed regimes; criminal syndicates like the Bragulan Mafiya, where even rogue Bragulan expats and renegades cannot tell those who have truly fled from the Empire's oppression from those who are IBGV plants, and other species of scum with purchaseable loyalties have been bought and paid for by the Bureau. Even the foreign intelligence services of other polities, including human ones, have consorted with the Bragulans - most notably the Shepistani Intelligence Service. It is widely believed that the 'People's Department of Limited Foreign Interaction and Human Affairs '''is largely an IBGV front that has helped the Bragulans extend their expansive spiderweb of contacts, and that the department's diplomatic liaisons are almost all IBGV agents to a bear. This gains credence to the popular CEID theory that the recent Bragulan moves at glasnot and bragstroika are all a part of a massive espionage maneuver, a strategic deception move of Bragskirovka. But perhaps the biggest Bragskirovka is in leading the likes of CEID to believe that it is a Bragskirovka when maybe it isn't one at all! External Vigilance also maintains several backdoors with its nearest K-Zone neighbors, from the Karlacks to the Byzantine Imperium and the Sovereignty. Worlds like Al-Kar and Jenova, despite their unlikely appearances, are used by the IBGV to discourse with both friends and enemies, and sometimes those in-between - when those who cannot simply be overcome by brute force or subversion come to discuss their terms of tolerance, standing each others' presence, and maybe even coming into coexistence. A coexistence disguised in clever Bragskirovkas, for sure. Though thoroughly familiar with navigating the grey latitudes, External Vigilance is not one to shy from going deep down into the murky realm of blackops and wetwork. The dark days of the Solarian Wars and the height of the cold conflicts between the Bragulan Star Empire and its greatest foe saw the IBGV test its mettle against the Sovereignty's CEID, and there in those unsung wars both organizations were shaped into what they are today. The string of assassinations and state-sponsored terror not only directed at the Sovereignty, but towards the minor Wild Space statelets that threatened to gravitate towards the Solarians' fold, and the ensuing CEID reprisals on those with Bragule and thus against Solaris, would become the stuff of horror stories - told by other intelligence agencies when they want to scare each other. ''A CEID agent receives a bag of minced meat with a pin bearing the CEID logo sticking out, while an IBGV agent gets a new rug for his floor. '' Outside the K-Zone, the IBGV has most recently been implicated in several high-profile assassinations - although the suspicions have never been confirmed - such as the mysterious unexplained vegemite poisoning of the last High Commissioner of the Outlands, whose death was shortly followed by a short but violent inter-species civil war and the subsequent disintegration of the Outlander Commissions. The tragic death of former Shepistani Presidential candidate James Crater - a known liberal and political opponent of General Sheppard whose platform was cuts to the war department - in a freak bicycle accident (that broke every bone in his body) on his peanut farm have also been tied to the Bureau, supposedly as a favor to General Sheppard (who did not wish to implicate the SIS). Aside from inciting anti-human violence, acts of sabotage and subterfuge, and secretly backing criminal organizations, the IBGV has also been accused of kidnapping - the most bizarre accusation being that linking the IBGV to the disappearance of none other than famed surrealist Sovereignty filmmaker C.J. Motonow, which Solarian theorists theorize was ordered by Imperator Byzon himself, who is said to have been a fan who wanted C.J. Motonow to direct a series of Bragulan propaganda films Byzon wished to star in. Internal Integrity The oft-unseen branch of the IBGV, at least to the outside galaxy. Within the Bragulan Star Empire, the presence of Internal Ideological Integrity is both ubiquitous and foreboding, omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent. In its domestic confines, Internal Integrity has no reason to act with External Vigilance's tact and subtlety, and the responsibilities of Integrity are twicefold that of External Vigilance's - but directed inwards, domestically, towards the apparatus of government and military, the various ministries and facets of the state, towards law and order, and the very Bragulan people themselves, all to ensure a safe and secure society. Internal Integrity are the eyes with which Imperator Byzon watches his beloved people and his Bragulan state, and it is the claws with which he clouts those who would threaten it from within - those worms who would eat at the core of his great society. The purpose of Internal Integrity, and all the other overbearing security mechanisms of the Bragulan state as well, is to reassure the Bragulan people that wherever they may be, Big Brother Byzon is watching''.